I. Field
The present invention relates generally to circuits, and more specifically to a display processor.
II. Background
Wireless communication devices (e.g., cellular phones) are widely used to provide voice and data communication. These wireless devices are also designed to provide an increasing number of functions and applications as their computational power and memory size increase. For example, many wireless devices have capabilities to capture and process still images and/or moving videos, support video gaming, and so on.
Video and graphics applications generally require extensive processing power, which may be provided by digital signal processors (DSPs), micro-processors, and so on. These processors may perform all of the required processing on raw image data and provide output image data to a display screen for presentation to a user. These processors may also support other functions and applications. Each video/graphics task performed by the processors consumes certain amount of resources, which then reduces the amount of resources available for other functions and applications.
Video and graphics applications also typically require many memory accesses to fetch raw image data from an external memory and to write processed image data back to the external memory. The memory accesses may be performed via an external bus interface (EBI). During the time that the image data is being fetched or written back, the EBI is tied up and cannot be used by other processors and/or for other applications, which is highly undesirable.
The display sizes for wireless devices are relatively small with current state-of-the-art technology but are likely to increase as technology improves. As the display sizes grow and color depth increases, video and graphics applications will likely become more sophisticated, consume more processor resources, and require more memory accesses.
There is therefore a need in the art for techniques to efficiently support video and graphics applications in wireless devices, especially as display sizes and/or color depth increase.